QuickBooks Product Update: August 2015

Here’s our regular update on the latest QuickBooks news, to help make things a little easier. This month we look at some smaller improvements that will aid your day-to-day bookkeeping, along with some enhancements to payroll within QuickBooks. We also re-cap the exciting new feature ideas available for you to try in QuickBooks Labs.

What’s new?Enhanced Customer screen
You’ve given us some feedback on how the Customer screen could be improved, so we’ve changed a couple of things to make it easier to use.

You told us that you need to see more information about your customers at a glance, so the Notes field on the customer record screen has been expanded by a third, to three lines.

You can add more information if required – a scroll bar will appear so that you can see the rest while you’re editing. When you’re viewing, rather than editing, a customer record a ‘…more’ link will indicate that there are additional notes to read.

We’ve also added ‘customer’ as a field that’s available to view on the Customer Transaction List. This is particularly useful if you have created any ‘sub-customers’. When viewing the transactions of the parent customer(s) you can see at a glance exactly which sub-customer is related to each one.

You can also filter as normal, so it’s easier to investigate specific issues (by viewing only overdue invoices and looking at which sub-customers were billed, for example).

Improved ‘Import Products & Services’ function
We have updated the Import Products and Services function so that it looks more like the rest of QuickBooks, which in turn makes it easier to both understand and use.

OK, you might be unlikely to use this function again if you’re already up and running with QuickBooks, but it’s another way in which we’re striving to make QuickBooks easier for everyone to use, whether you’re a new user or already fully up to speed.

Company Cog -> Products and Services -> Down arrow next to ‘New’ button -> Import

Payroll enhancements
We’ve made a number of improvements to our integrated Payroll function over the past few months and now we’ve made a few more important changes based on your feedback.

1. Now you can customise pay periods across the year, so that you can accommodate unusual circumstances (perhaps you need to pay your staff early in advance of the Christmas holidays, for example).

Employees -> Payroll Settings -> Pay Calendar -> Change Pay Date

2. Distribution of physical payslips can be a big overhead and these days not everyone wants to keep hard copies of documentation, so it’s now possible to e-mail payslips to your employees. This option is provided during the final ‘Summary & Advance’ process at the end of running a payroll, alongside submitting your RTI. The documents are sent as PDF documents in an e-mail attachment. Every document is password protected with a unique employee password, and a log screen is available to check delivery success.

Run Payroll -> Summary & Advance

3. It’s now more straightforward to submit an Earlier Year Update (EYU). Previously it was necessary to input Year To Date figures for each employee but this is no longer required, making the process smoother and saving you time.

QuickBooks Labs:
The QuickBooks team try hard to keep coming up with ideas to make life easier; QuickBooks Labs is the test bed for potential new features that we’re excited for you to try. None of them are the finished article, which means some things might not work perfectly, but we’d love to hear what you think. A few of the most interesting options are listed below.

Why not take a look for yourself? Just log in to QuickBooks and click the Company Cog to find the link to Labs and get started. Features that you switch on within Labs can be easily switched off if you’re not happy with them.

A couple of the most recent ideas are shown below. Note that sometimes experiments do break or disappear, but sometimes they grow up to be real, live features!

Company Cog > QuickBooks Labs

A new look for reports (beta, in QuickBooks Labs)
The reporting offered by QuickBooks is an incredibly powerful way to quickly and easily generate detailed reports that summarise the state of your business. It’s not just about seeing where you stand though – those same reports can help to provide insight on where your business should go next.

There are no new reports as part of this feature, just new layouts that hopefully make some of the existing ones a bit easier to understand. When you’ve activated the feature, navigate to the new Redesigned Reports tab in the Reports screen. A selection of 19 key reports are currently available in a new style.

If you’d like to provide feedback click the Company Cog on the QuickBooks home page, select ‘Feedback’ and submit your comments with the tag #NewLookReports.

Custom invoice template upload (beta, in QuickBooks Labs)
This function gives you the option to create ‘offline’ Word documents that can be uploaded to QuickBooks as invoice templates.

You’ll have greater freedom to define the layout and content of each template, to suit the needs of your business or those of your clients – the QuickBooks invoice shown below was created using this new function.

You can find more information in this video. If you’d like to provide feedback, please submit your comments with the tag #InvoiceImport.

Information may be abridged and therefore incomplete. This document/information does not constitute, and should not be considered a substitute for, legal or financial advice. Each financial situation is different, the advice provided is intended to be general. Please contact your financial or legal advisors for information specific to your situation.